RED_NOVA'S PROFILE

My advice is to start with a premade base and pixel smaller stuff like clothes and hair so you can learn from a solid foundation. If you're learning how to pixel from scratch, your bases will look out of place since you're still figuring out how everything works.

My very first game on this site had me edit the sprites of the main characters using the RTP as reference for shading and color selection so they wouldn't clash too much with the RTP art style:



My latest game used the POP! Horror sprite bodies as a base and I pixeled all the hair and clothes myself. To back up Darken's and Ocean's statements that lower resolution is the way to go when learning, all sprites and tiles for that game were made at half resolution and were upscaled to the proper size before being imported to the project. (hidden for size):

It depends on the game and what it wants to emphasize.

For me, personally, it's less about the amount of items you can carry and more about how useful those items are. You can have 99 item stack and can hold every item you can possible pick up, but if you don't use them, then they mostly just serve as fluff to provide players a comfortable backup instead of a crucial component of the gameplay. Paper Mario: the Thousand Year Door and Legend of Dragoon are good examples of useful items with a limited inventory. You have limited inventories in both games, but attack items give you options that the party's skills just don't cover, like an AOE lightning attack or inflicting certain status ailments.

I did something like this in Prayer of the Faithless by limiting the item stack ceiling to 10 instead of 99. Despite the limited stack size, I encouraged players to use items more by:

1: Making them cost no Stamina to use (in PotF, every action costs Stamina, even basic attacks).
2: Preventing players from picking up items in the field if they have a full inventory so they can go back and get them if they need/want to later.
3: Making them relatively inexpensive to purchase from shops compared to other items.
4: Making attack item's damage scale based on the user's Attack stat so that items found in the beginning of the game are viable even at the end.
5: Having attack items bypass a crucial defense stat when used against an enemy.

If skills can be freely swapped between characters, then there isn't really a defined "healer" archetype unless you make your own. In that case, most issues with healers don't apply since you can just assign whatever skills you want.

Though the concern about healing having summons that can do other stuff is intriguing. Couple that with MC death = game over, I'd argue that it's a good idea to put the healing spell on someone other than Sanzo. I'm not familiar with Saiyuki's battle system, but that heal skill can be added to someone else to give Sanzo the room they need to get their offense going with their summons.

I did not mean to dismiss anyone's opinion here. If I gave that impression, I apologize. Like I said in my last post, there was a lot to think about on those topics, and each suggestion and idea that worked within their games all had systems built to support them. Despite the very tongue-in-cheek title, I believe healers have their place in RPGs because there is no universal "right" way to go about healing. Each idea presented has bonuses and drawbacks to consider, and finding one that works for a game will always be an ongoing process the more games you design.

But hey, if you're looking for more discussion, feel free to respond to any of the other posts here. Anyone can respond to anyone in this thread if they so wish! I may have started the topic, but it's not like I'm the only one who's allowed to reply to people.

Marrend, while your suggestions didn't quite work, I did find a solution thanks to it.

Turns out, while you can't exactly edit the plugin code itself, you CAN edit the argument definitions. I opened up the plugin and found the argument for PictureName. After changing it from "str" to "eval", the input parameter won't be considered a whole String:




And now, so long as I surround all the string values with double quotes like you have in your example (even when I DON'T want to reference a variable), I can finally reference variables in the plugin command!




I'll have to do some more testing to make sure this doesn't screw up anything else, but I think we have a solution now. Hopefully VisuStella team can get back to me on a solution that doesn't require messing with the plugin parameter itself.

Thanks for all your help, Marrend!


EDIT: PSA for anyone else looking to try this in their own project: changing the argument type will erase all values you've entered in PictureName in your current project. Please make a backup of your project before trying this yourself!